Britain's Quest for a Role

A Diplomatic Memoir from Europe to the UN

David Hannay

• Editorial: I.B. Tauris
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857732729
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Categoría: Politische Biographien

British post-imperial decline has been much examined. In these memoirs, David Hannay, one of Britain's leading behind-the-scenes players in this process, provides fascinating frontline information and insights into Britain's complex relations with Washington and Europe. From his early career in the Middle East to his role as a top diplomat, Hannay presents a detailed and authoritative narrative of British foreign policy in the second half of the 20th Century. A key player in European policy-making, he was directly involved in bringing about the UK's entry into the European Community, as well as being closely involved in the Annan plan while he was the UK's Special Representative in Cyprus. Hannay illuminates vital themes in the early relationship between Britain and the EU that are increasingly relevant today: British membership, EU enlargement and Britain's contribution to the European budget. From the complex relations between Margaret Thatcher and her diplomatic establishment to Britain's decisions leading up to the 1970s oil supply crisis, Hannay analyses the causes and consequences of major British foreign policy decisions over the past 50 years.
An informed and balanced ringside view of diplomatic history over 50 years, this book will fascinate general readers and prove essential reading for specialists.

1

IRAN 1960–1961

The drive from London to Tehran in the high summer of 1960 was a long, hot and hard one, but fascinating. We (I was accompanied for the journey to Tehran by a New College friend, Ian White-Thomson) had given ourselves a month to complete the trip, which left time for a week in Istanbul, a few days in Trabzon in eastern Turkey and some flexibility to allow for incidents or accidents along the way (there was in fact only one, when I clipped the wing of a taxi in Istanbul, detaching a mass of gaudy ornaments but doing no damage to my Land Rover which was made of sterner stuff). Nowadays a newly posted diplomat almost invariably arrives by air in the capital city of the country to which he is going and is plunged immediately into the routine of embassy work. I never regretted the more leisurely, but also much more educative, route by which I reached Tehran (and subsequently, the following year, Kabul also). It gave me some feel for the region and the countries where I was to spend the next three years. And that region was not, as it would now tend to be called, the wider Middle East, but rather Central Asia, which is historically and topographically much more apt.

We crossed Europe at a great pace, since we had to do a longish detour through Yugoslavia and Greece to reach Istanbul (the Foreign Office at that time did not allow its diplomats to go the more direct route through Iron Curtain countries like Bulgaria). But once we reached Istanbul we had some opportunity to explore what seemed to me at the time, and has seemed even more so ever since, one of the world’s great cities, beautiful, picturesque and steeped in a complex history. It was of course a much smaller city then than the huge, sprawling megalopolis it has now become; there were no bridges across the Bosporus and one had to take one of the car ferries which criss-crossed the border between Europe and Asia at all hours of the day and night. It was in Edirne and Istanbul that I first came into contact with the mosques of the great Ottoman architect, Sinan; and thus laid the foundations of a lifelong passionate admiration of Islamic architecture, which was only strengthened as I moved further east and saw the great religious buildings of Iran, Afghanistan and north India. It was here too that the first, modest dents were inflicted on my hitherto totally Eurocentric historical world view; and I began to understand that there was a great deal more to the history and societies of these countries than their interaction with the dominant modern era world powers in Western Europe and North America, important though that interaction had been and still was to the way they conducted their affairs.

From Istanbul we passed as quickly as we could through Ankara, which seemed a graceless, rather lifeless modern city set in a singularly unappealing, tree-less Anatolian landscape (a poor impression which, I fear, no number of subsequent visits – frequent during the much later period when I was dealing with Cyprus – has done much to modify); passed along Turkey’s Black Sea coast from Samsun to Trabzon; and then climbed up steep passes, to reach for the first time the Central Asian highland plateaus across which the rest of our journey took us. Passing Mount Ararat on our left, we eventually reached and crossed without incident the Iranian border.

I had done my best, during the academic year I had spent at the School of Oriental and African Studies studying Persian, to read widely on Iran’s history and to read too the numerous travel books about the country, outstanding amongst them Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana. But no amount of reading can prepare you for the visual impact of a new country. The rough, unpaved road which sloped gradually down from the frontier watershed towards the city of Tabriz, and then on for hundreds more kilometres to Qazvin and Tehran, took us across a typical Iranian landscape, huge vistas of tawny-coloured plains, backed by bluish-grey mountain ranges; here and there a green blotch marking the site of a village, with in every case the otherwise featureless desert dotted with the lines of the air-holes of underground water channels, known as qanats, which brought water from the often quite-distant mountains to the small cultivated areas around the villages. The villages were poor, no signs of electricity; but at each end of every village, standing a little forlorn on dusty roundabouts, there would be a gold-painted plaster statue of the present Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and at the other end of the village a similar statue of his father, the founder of the dynasty Reza Shah Pahlavi. The political statement was clear and unmistakable.

By this stage we were pressed for time if we were to arrive in Tehran by the date we had provided in advance and to avoid an embarrassing search for our whereabouts. But we did manage a small detour, to the dusty, run-down little village of Soltanieh, once, in the fourteenth century, the capital of the Il-Khan Mongol dynasty, (descended from Genghis Khan) from which a huge empire, stretching across Central Asia, was ruled. Now not a trace of that capital city was left apart from the Mausoleum of Oljeitu (the ruler who built it), a truly staggeringly beautiful building despite its advanced state of decrepitude. There it stood, a colossal egg-shaped, pale blue dome mounted on an octagonal base, with the remains of eight slender minarets, now truncated and resembling broken teeth, surrounding the dome – egg-shaped in the sense that it was more pointed than was normally the case in other great domes of that period but also resembling a cracked egg, with parts of the dome having collapsed and leaving gaps open to the sky and huge fissures threatening further dilapidation. Inside the mausoleum, whose dome soared more than 170 feet over our head, the floor was littered with broken tiles and other masonry. No building I had ever seen more merited the motto of Sir Christopher Wren’s great cathedral ‘si monumentum requiris, circumspice’. But it was also a reminder that between those two great Mongol destroyers of the world, Genghis and Tamerlane, came men of taste and culture.

A day later we drove, hot, dirty and exhausted, into the British Embassy’s town compound in Tehran. This monument to an earlier age seemed like paradise. Huge, soaring oriental plane trees shaded well-tended gardens; in the centre was a large pool of translucent, greenish cool water fed directly from the mountains behind Tehran by underground channels, which served the dual purpose of irrigating the gardens and providing a swimming pool for those who worked there. Dotted around the compound were various offices and the houses of embassy staff. To one side stood the imposing cupola of the Ambassador’s residence and a rather odd, stumpy campanile whose purpose I never did fathom. The residence (damaged by an invading mob in 2011) was a monument in its own right, its entrance hall bedecked with oriental-style mirror work (a reminder it had originally been designed by Indian Ministry of Works architects in the nineteenth century), its dining room containing a metal plaque detailing the seating plan for the dinner Winston Churchill had hosted there for Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin during the wartime Tehran conference in November 1943. It was all very grand; and just a bit out of tune with the spirit of the times and Britain’s relative place in the world of 1960. But that was not my first reaction as we relaxed that evening, showered and well supplied with cold drinks, at an embassy party.

The Iran of 1960 was the Shah’s Iran, and the Iranian government was, effectively, the Shah. The press was muzzled and even the mildest criticism of the regime was discouraged. Political opposition, insofar as it existed at all, was of a mild, carefully sanctioned variety, stage-managed by the authorities. The security police (Savak) were omnipresent. The disparity between rich and poor, although less than it was subsequently to become following the quadrupling of the oil price in 1973, was glaring. The great aristocratic landowners (many of whom regarded the Shah and his family as upstarts, although they were careful where and to whom they said that) possessed huge tracts of the fairly sparse cultivable land and many villages scattered around the huge country; corruption at every level of society was prevalent. Tehran, the most recent of Iran’s several capital cities (Isfahan and Shiraz and other cities having been favoured by earlier dynasties) was already a vast, sprawling Third World city stretching for many miles along the foot of the Elburz mountains, whose 14,000 foot peaks (still in those days visible from anywhere in the city and not, as now, obscured by smog), towered over it to the north. The city was on a kind of slanted platform, the higher edge of which, right under the mountains, was more than 1,000 feet higher than the lower edge some 10 or 15 kilometres to the south. The city had no natural limits and was steadily creeping out into the desert which stretched away towards the south, towards the holy city of Qom and Isfahan. The rich and influential lived in the northern suburbs, as close as they could get to the mountains, where the air was cooler and the water more plenteous. The commercial centre of the city, the university (which was almost the only centre of open opposition to the Shah’s rule) and the extensive bazaar came further down the hill, and beyond and below that came the teeming shantytowns of the poor. It was a bit like a layer cake; it was not a recipe for social cohesion.

Britain’s relationship with the Shah’s Iran at that time was, on the surface, excellent. We were military allies in CENTO; through the Consortium, which had taken the place of the old Anglo-Iranian Oil Company following the fall of Mossadeq, BP continued to play an important role in Iran’s one key industry, the production of oil, on which the whole economy crucially depended; we were an important commercial partner. But beneath that smooth surface there were plenty of cross-currents. No Iranian, and certainly not the Shah himself, had forgotten our manipulative role during the period of Iran’s turmoil and weakness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when we had played off one faction against another and, at first in competition and then in concert with Tsarist Russia, had actually divided the country up into spheres of influence. Nor had they forgotten that, in 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, we had together occupied the country in order to secure it as a supply route for the Western allies to the Soviet Union, and had packed the abdicated Reza Shah off to exile in South Africa where he died. So although, subsequently, we and the Americans had helped the Shah to resist Stalin’s post-war attempts to set up independent communist-dominated statelets in Azerbaijan and in Kurdistan, and although we had saved his bacon in August 1953 when we had encouraged General Zahedi’s military coup which overthrew the elected government of Mohammad Mossadeq and enabled the Shah to return from brief exile, there was always a lack of trust there, the feeling that we could be up to our old tricks again, that our commitment to him and his regime might be less than total.

My own role in the nine months I was to spend in Iran had little to do with such high politics and everything to do with learning the language and familiarising myself with the country and its culture, the expectation, in fact never realised, being that I would return to the Embassy in Tehran some time after my first Persian-speaking posting in Kabul. The first stage of the process was to spend two months on my own in a provincial city where there would be almost no foreigners to distract me from total immersion in speaking the language. The city chosen for me was Mashhad, the capital of the province of Khorasan, in the extreme north-east of the country, sandwiched next door to the Soviet Union (since metamorphosed into Turkmenistan) and to Afghanistan; and it did indeed fulfil the desired criteria since there was, to the best of my knowledge, only one British family there, the British Council representative, who lent me a room in which to work. So, two weeks after arriving in Tehran, I set off for Mashhad by the more picturesque northern route which took one close to the Soviet frontier; on then through one of the very few patches of forest remaining in Iran, stopping off briefly at a small town, Bujnurd, inhabited by Kurds who had been settled there by Shah Abbas in the seventeenth century to hold off Turkomen marauders; and finally to Mashhad. Mashhad, like most Iranian cities, was steeped in history, having been, along with Samarqand, Bokhara and Herat, one of the chief urban centres of the Timurid empire; having also briefly in the eighteenth century been the capital of Iran during the reign of Nadir Shah, who looted the Peacock Throne from Delhi. For centuries it had been an important place of pilgrimage for Shi’a Muslims who came to worship at the shrine of the Imam Reza, the eighth Shi’a Imam, said to have been poisoned by the Arab Caliph Harun Al Rashid with a bunch of grapes. Now a city which had once been a hub along the Silk Road and then, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a focus for the ‘Great Game’ between Tsarist Russian and Indian-based British representatives, lay isolated, close to two frontiers across which virtually no trade or other movements occurred, and dependent almost entirely on the pilgrim traffic.

Not much of the old Mashhad remained, but what little did – the golden domed shrine of the Imam Reza and, alongside it, the mausoleum of Gauhar Shad, the wife of Tamerlane’s son Shah Rokh, with its elegant blue and green tiled dome, both embedded in a rabbit-warren of covered bazaars (since destroyed) – was both beautiful and picturesque. The second, but not the first, of those adjectives could have been applied to the British Council compound, where I studied. Formerly the base for the British Consul-General, from where were directed some of the complex intrigues of the Great Game it had once housed a squadron of Indian Cavalry. Now little remained other than an ornate but crumbling gatehouse and the Consul-General’s residence, which was the British Council’s cultural centre. I was lodged at first in a seedy hotel, and then, not without some difficult negotiation, in the house of a civil engineer in the bazaar quarter of the city. My two most regular interlocutors were my landlord and my teacher of Persian, but I gradually came to meet a number of their friends particularly on the evening strolls around the one dusty little park or out at the Coca-Cola bottling plant which had recently been built and had instantly become the main focus of Mashhad’s social life – the inhabitants of Mashhad being as addicted to the Paseo as those of Madrid. But I also used to slip away most days to the covered bazaar around the shrine where the jewellers who set turquoises (much of the world’s supply came from a medieval mine of the semi-precious stone near Nishapur, an hour or more drive west of Mashhad), and the carpet merchants, and the sellers of resplendent (if rather smelly) embroidered sheepskin coats seemed only too happy to engage in endless conversation. The bazaar around the shrine was also the only place from which a non-Muslim could see into the shrine, the shrine itself being off-limits. So I had to be satisfied with tantalising glimpses of the courtyards thronged with pilgrims, and the domes, seen from the back window of a stall in the bazaar.

Those two months in Mashhad left me with a number of impressions. The first was that the loyalty to the Shah’s regime of the middle class, to which my two chief daily interlocutors and their friends belonged, was skin-deep at best – and yet these were the people who had probably benefitted the most from the relative stability and prosperity of those last few years. While I was in Mashhad the Shah’s first son was born, thus, at least in his eyes and in those of his supporters, assuring the future of the dynasty by providing the male heir which two previous marriages had failed to do; and thus too a cause for rejoicing. But most of the talk I heard was about the decision for the baby to be delivered in a public hospital, which the Shah and his wife had no doubt intended to show a popular touch. Of course it had to be a boy this time, so having the birth in a public hospital made it easier to switch if it turned out to be a girl, went the whispered rumours. My second impression was less well formed than the first and consisted of a feeling that the impact of the West, its technology and its culture, was putting some heavy strains on Iran’s traditional society. It seemed to me that many features of modern Western society as well as its values and institutions, our democracy and our respect for human rights which had taken us centuries and much strife to evolve, were being thrust at people who had had little preparation for them and whose basic culture provided little space or support for them. Yet I had no inkling that these strains might erupt at a later stage into a revolutionary religious uprising. Like many of my generation I suppose I simply could not envisage a situation in which religion made a major come-back into politics. The third impression was the extraordinary prevalence of the fantasy that Britain still pulled the strings worldwide, and most particularly in Iran – a myth which I did not again come across in such a virulent form until I became a frequent visitor to Cyprus in the late 1990s. I can remember arguing with my teacher in Mashhad that he had quite misunderstood the real balance of power in the modern world where the United States was now the overwhelmingly dominant force; to which he responded knowingly that all Iranians knew who really controlled US policy in Iran; at which point I gave up.

Back in Tehran after my two months in Mashhad, although I had no formal function in the Embassy apart from doing some parttime work in the Chancery and translating some intelligence reports handed over to us by the Iranians about the Soviet penetration of Afghanistan, I was invited to join the weekly meeting of the Embassy’s Persian speakers at which we pooled our information and discussed the trends that had been noted. At that time the Shah had not yet forced us to drop all our contacts with the opposition, as he was to do later under pain of Britain being cut off from profitable contracts. So our collective range of contacts was reasonably wide. I found my impressions were widely shared. The general view was that the Shah’s regime was fragile; and that a political, economic or social shock could well bring it tumbling down. That view was not shared or welcomed by the Ambassador and other senior non-Persian speakers, and this created a good deal of tension over the Embassy’s political reporting. However, all agreed that the Iranian tendency to attribute almost supernatural influence to Britain’s policies in Iran was irremediable. This tendency was perfectly illustrated when from time to time there were stage-managed elections to parliament. Despite the fact that both government and opposition candidates were carefully chosen by the regime and vetted by Savak, these same candidates would one by one form up at the Embassy to ask for Britain’s support. Invariably assured that we did not do that sort of thing any more, they would smile and say they knew we had to say that. Then, once elected, the successful candidates would appear to thank us for our support.

The remaining months of language study were interspersed with more travels around the country. Language students were encouraged to take two weeks to go to some remote area, thus improving the Embassy’s geographical coverage, on the sole condition that we travel by public transport. So I set off by bus to the far south-east, tracing the southern edge of the huge central desert, through the architecturally and historically fascinating cities of Yazd (where a small Zoroastrian community still existed) and Kerman; then from Kerman my route went due south by a barely discernible road to Bandar Abbas, 24 hours of bone-jolting agony through largely empty, featureless country. Bandar Abbas was on the Gulf coast, at the Strait of Hormuz, the choke-point at its entry. This former trading post by now consisted of no more than a single row of dilapidated fishermen’s houses; but a customs motor boat was made available to reach the island of Hormuz and the ruins of the Portuguese fortress which had briefly been the centre of Portugal’s control of the area in the sixteenth century. Then an even more demanding journey, squashed in the cab of a rickety lorry, back from Bandar Abbas to Shiraz by a route which certainly could not be described as a road, if only judged by the number of times the driver lost his way. This was a journey which reminded me of the huge scale of Iran as a country, of its emptiness, and of the abject poverty that prevailed once one moved away from the bright lights of Tehran and the main cities; it also conveyed the faint rumbling of discontent among the mainly Baluch population of the south-east, who had their own language, were Sunni, not Shi’a, and felt closer kinship to their ethnic compatriots in Pakistan than to the Iranian state.

The Iranian New Year, which falls on the spring equinox, and which is a wonderful, ten day holiday full of pre-Islamic rituals, I spent with a friend from the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Yusuf Akbar, at his father’s home in Rasht near the Caspian coast beyond the mountains that closed Tehran in from the north. There we explored the marshes along the coast that harboured the sturgeon fishery, the source of Iran’s valuable caviar production. Yusuf’s father was from a prominent local family. He recounted that in the past he would always be invited to the palace when he visited Tehran, to give the Shah a frank briefing on the state of opinion and grievances in the provinces along the Caspian coast; but those calls had now ceased, another sign of the increasing gap between the autocratic ruler and his subjects.

And then in the spring of 1961 the Queen and Prince Philip came on their first state visit to Iran. Part of this visit was to include a trip to Persepolis, the former capi...